Automatic call distributors (ACDs) are specialized phone systems designed to route incoming calls to available personnel, or agents so that calls are properly and evenly distributed. Increasingly, companies are using ACDs to make outgoing calls. ACDs generally perform one or more of the following functions: (i) recognize and answer incoming calls; (ii) review database(s) for instructions on what to do with a particular call; (iii) using these instructions, identify an appropriate agent and queue the call, often times providing a prerecorded message; and (iv) route the call to an agent as soon as the agent is available.
The term automatic call distributor comes from distributing the incoming calls in a logical pattern to a group of agents. That pattern may be uniform (to distribute the work uniformly), or it may be top-down (the same agents in the same order get the calls and are kept busy, the ones on the top typically being kept busier than the ones on the bottom), or it may be specialty routing, where calls are routed to agents who are most likely able to help the caller the most.
Skill-based routing (AKA resume routing) is an ACD feature that provides for the selection of an appropriate agent for handling a particular call. With this feature, agents are registered with their skills set as resources for handling calls. Examples for different skill sets are languages (English, French, Spanish, etc.) or business types (home insurance, life insurance, car insurance, etc.). The caller indicates the skill that she requires for a particular transaction, and the system either finds the appropriate resource or queues the caller until the resource with the requested skill becomes available.
Many large enterprises employ distributed call centers. For example, a company may have call centers in New York, Atlanta, and San Francisco. Each call center mainly handles local calls, however it may also handle overflow calls from other call centers. Central offices may provide the signaling for handling the call distribution as part of a 1-800 service. Such distributed call centers often employ voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and utilize a wide area network (WAN) to reduce operation costs. While the local area network (LAN) is provisioned to handle local calls, the WAN bandwidth is usually limited, and thus it can transport only a limited number of calls to each particular overflow call center.